Though I don't agree with this post 100%, I do think there is a good point buried in here, even if I don't agree that race is 100% the issue. Both parties have gone all-in on the broader culture war. This has had the effects of (1) either ignoring other issues or incorporating those issues into this culture war, and (2) both sides have gone to what I feel are extremes in defense of their positions in this culture war.

I firmly believe that the average American's attitude toward most social issues is something along the lines of "do whatever you want, just don't bother me." Both sides have taken the position that just minding your own business is not enough anymore. In my state of Florida, you have a Republican party on one hand that is trying to argue that blacks should be happy that their ancestors were slaves, and is actively trying to destroy a massive corporation because that business made some pro-gay statement. On the other hand, you have local Democrat state attorneys that has taken the position that prosecuting people for crimes is racist. Politics has gotten extreme when it comes to "my people versus your people." I don't remember it being as extreme 20 years ago when I was in college, but that may have been because there were more pressing issues affecting the country at the time.

We now have the two political parties locked in to these issues, and I personally don't believe it is to our benefit.

One of the things seems a lot less significant in scale and extreme. State government versus an activist attorney?

I'm not sure what you're referencing as the extreme left example. Is this an example of the desire for police reform? From many personal experiences, loads of secondhand experiences, and the broader history, police in America are basically the largest gang and in dire need of reform. This relates to race as police in America were derived from slave patrols and have always been racial.

I do sympathize with calls to eliminate police and rethink our approach because if we try to reform from within, we'll cannibalize ourselves in bureaucracy with every police union versus every city, etc. At the very least police unions need reformed and there should be (better?) national standards for police training.

In a vacuum, of course the decision of what crimes get prosecuted vigorously is tied up with issues of race.

I agree that Republicans have stoked white grievance by characterizing efforts to address income inequality as giveaways to minorities. I agree that framing everything as a referendum on social policy (whether related to race, ethnicity or something else) has become more prevalent on both sides of the aisle. And I agree that the net effect has been a diminishment of solidarity among the less wealthy, probably to the benefit of the most wealthy.

But the whole thing feels more like a cancerous growth to me than a grand plan--that is, harmful, but more organic than deliberate. I don't see the grand scheme to benefit the billionaire class through social division. I just see a bunch of self-interested politicians doing what seems expedient in order to remain relevant and in power, no matter the consequences.

I've read you saying this a few times now, that you think there's no coordination among the billionaire class, and that it is mostly just organic greed manifesting itself. And in some areas where the fallout from billionaire greed has caused harm, I'd agree with you. But there is coordination at times, and there are plenty of documented cases of this. Take the Powell memo as an example:

https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/

I was referring more to coordination among politicians to benefit the billionaire class than coordination by the billionaire class. In any case, I am not denying that there is a degree of coordination, whether we are talking about billionaires or GOP senators. And sometimes it is deliberate. But a lot of the time, it is just a bunch of people with similar interests acting in a self-interested way, which results in coordination, albeit not of the planned variety.

Antitrust would be a decent analogy. All the large law firms in NYC pay basically the same salary to first year lawyers. That sort of coordination can occur because of a deliberate (and highly illegal) price-fixing scheme. But a lot of the time, it is just an artifact of self-interest. In the case of the legal market in NYC, what you have seen historically is a raft of large law firms matching the salaries announced by the most prestigious firms because they feel like they have to do so in order to remain competitive in the hiring market.

Monopolies and cartels and all sorts of advantages, whether blessed by the system or not, naturally form and accrue to those with outsized money and power. It's very easy to do and not leave a paper trail, in fact a highly efficient and resourceful engine like capitalism will find the best and most novel pathways to monopoly effects and give a simulacrum of the benefits of free market capitalism i.e. appearing efficient and giving the best product at best price point for the consumer given competition while in fact setting prices as high as they can get away with. And none of this requires a discussion from the respective CEOs about the arrangement, it's just something that the market will try out and learn works well. There are loads of ways to rig markets, some in subtle ways, some overt, some legal and blessed and some verboten. The market wants more money and power, so it does what it can get away with to rig the game in as legal a manner as they can get away with, because of duty to shareholders and the central logic of our society: make money and get power. And where it's necessary to be illegal, they just pay the fine and keep on doing business the same way. Unless we regulate, businesses capture not just markets, but by lobbying and connections to politicians they often end up capturing parts of the government and/or state, which is supposed to be the worst nightmare of libertarian economists, and yet the system thrives under (this version of) capitalism, which has been described by David Harvey as 'socialism for the rich'. Corporate welfare where entire industries take bailouts, leaving all the risk on the taxpayer, where the government develops a product or pays for its development and then a private company gets all the profits from it.

I find it more useful to talk in specifics.

Suppose that Apple releases a new version of the iphone in January 2024 and prices the phone at $1150. Samsung releases its latest and greatest phone three months later. Samsung obviously is aware of the price of the new iphone when it releases its new phone. Armed with the knowledge of the new iphone price and its historical knowledge of the mobile phone market, but without talking to Apple, Samsung decides that the optimal price for its new phone is $1100, a shade below the cost of the new iphone but still a very expensive phone.

I'm sure you would agree that Apple and Samsung have not violated U.S. antitrust law in my example. Even so, have they "rigged" the market for mobile phones according your definition? If so, how? And if so, what solution do you favor to prevent such "rigging" in the future?

I find it very important to stay zoomed out for the most part, because not every market is alike in the variety of ways it can be rigged, but ok. It's the difference between implicit collusion and explicit collusion. You don't need to be a particularly experienced poker player to realise that late in a tournament it's in your interest to check it down when there's a dry side pot. Here, apple and samsung and have an interest in making the most profit. In the short run they might make more than their rivals by undercutting them and having smaller profit / phone but a higher %age of the marketplace, but they know from experience this leads to a traveller's dilemma style race to the bottom where the consumer wins, and they don't want the consumer winning because it's in effect a zero sum game, so they price on the higher side, ready to cut their prices a little if they need to appear competitive, but they know that consumers aren't at all perfectly rational and will sometimes just pay higher prices for no reason other than 'loyalty' (which I notice contains the letters lol. lolyalty?) so they charge as much as the market is willing to bear. Much like opening a negotiation with a crazy demand, as per the origin of the overton window - ask for more than you want, or that you expect to get - and you'll stretch the price windows in your favour. Thus you get effective monopolies, and the need to regulate.

In terms of solutions, you could start by reversing Ford vs Dodge, a scotus case where they ruled against Henry Ford who wanted to do good by his customers and workforce and enforced the duty to the shareholders as primal. You would need to rearrange the entire structure of your society away from the raw desire to increase power and money by exploiting others. You could do this by just regulation all over the show, things like 100% inheritance tax to do away with most inequality within a generation, one-off wealth taxes, a return to 50s-70s level of taxation in general, state ownership of all utilities, not forgetting of course reform and defunding of the police, empowerment of regulatory bodies like OSHA and EPA. Sorry if that's getting away from the thrust of the main issue here, which is how to prevent direct consumer exploitation via pricing. I don't know, I'm not an economist, I'm sure there are many ways to do it. I remember reading that Japan in particular has a corporate culture whereby corporations are beholden not just to their shareholders but to all stakeholders. If you're interested in reforming the economy, I feel like that attitude would be a good place to start.

I hear what you're saying, and sometimes that's absolutely true. Really though, there's a decent amount of coordination, but it depends on what industry sectors you're talking about. Once citizens united happened, a lot of these largest lobbying groups went dark, and are now unregistered, which makes their activities even more difficult to track.

Because the reality is there's a massive right-wing think tank network, and that network is responsible for all the strategy and talking points, which are funded by multiple billionaires. It's very rare that a think tank just has one right wing billionaire funding it. So the strategy and talking points are approved and then passed on to their media apparatus and all GOP congress members. That takes a decent amount of coordination.

Then you have stuff like this, where people are caught on tape talking about shadow groups they are working with:
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/10121...s-climate-push

You have people like MTG and Kayne fkn West being sponsored in the dark by large right wing mega donors:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kanye-...-by-gop-elites

This is a bit long but it's also in audio, where NYT investigative journalist break down how corporations (ie, billionaires), influence congress:
https://www.npr.org/2014/02/13/27644...uence-congress

I could go on, but there's more coordination that you might think. I'd love to be more centrist on this and believe it's just random results of greed, but in a lot of cases it's really not imho. It's extremely contrived with coordinated intentions.

I'm still not sure you think Apple and Samsung are "rigging" the market in my hypothetical.

As you note, a lot of the stuff you mention here has nothing to do with pricing to consumers. Defunding the police isn't going to result in a lower price point for your new iphone.

Based on a quick review, I'm not sure that the fiduciary duties of corporate officers and directors are much different in Japan than in the U.S.

In any case, what you are talking about is a stakeholder-centric model of governance rather than a shareholder-centric model of governance.

https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/20...te-governance/

I'm not sure how different that would be in the U.S. in practice. Under either model, the primary duty of the officers and directors is to the corporation. The main difference is that it probably would be easier under the stakeholder model for officers and directors to justify decisions that favored a broader range of stakeholders on the ground that the decision was in the long term interests of the corporation.

I don't think my views on this issue are more or less "centrist" than yours. Your view is more soft conspiratorial (though not remotely crazy), and my view is more cynical about human nature and human competence.

As for Citizens United, you will get no argument from me. It was and is a disaster for American politics.

Maybe those two views aren't so mutually exclusive, though. Both can be true, and perhaps if you took a look at how many think tanks are being funded by multiple billionaires, you might come to the same conclusion as I.

Snippets from the below article:
“This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, a frequent critic of undisclosed Wall Street donations to think tanks.

The likely conclusions of some think tanks reports, documents show, are discussed with donors — or even potential ones — before the research is complete. Drafts of the studies have been shared with donors whose opinions have then helped shape final reports.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/u...-lobbying.html

And if you haven't read "Dark Money" by Jane Myers, I'd highly recommend it. NYT's review:

It is this conservative ascendancy that Jane Mayer chronicles in “Dark Money.” The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.

A staff writer for The New Yorker, *Mayer spent five years working on “Dark Money,” which originated with an article on the Koch family she published in the magazine in 2010. Neither Charles nor David Koch agreed to talk to her, and several of the most important figures in their political network were unavailable. But she reached hundreds of sources who did want to talk: longtime conservative campaign operatives, business associates, political opponents and political finance scholars. Some of these sources spoke on the record and some did not, but all in all “Dark Money” emerges as an impressively reported and well-documented work.

Yeah sorry the defunding the police stuff was a stoned tangent.

Are you familiar with the travellers' dilemma? If not, two travellers lose an identical artefact on their journey home and the airline operator is obliged to compensate each of them, but doesn't know how to value the artefacts. So he places them in separate rooms and says 'each of you give me a value between $2 and $100. Whoever says the lower number will be taken to be the honest one and they will get the value they said plus a bonus $1. Whoever says the higher number will be taken to be dishonest and will be compensated that same value but minus $2.' As per the prisoners dilemma both participants are taken to be rationally self-interested. If one starts at $100, the other realises he can undercut them and go with $99 in order to make $101; but as a counter-strategy the first goes with $98 in order to further undercut, and by an iterative process the supposedly game theory optimal solution is to say $2. Counter-intuitive, but this is the nature of races to the bottom. This would be the solution were the condition of the game 'beat the other guy or minimise the chances of being beaten', but if the game does not take place in a zero sum vacuum then rational self-interest dictates avoiding minimising our payouts and instead maximising by choosing $99 or $100 in the reasonable expectation that the other guy will do the same too. This is the logic of union-busting and buying power and 'divide and conquer'.

If we transfer this theoretical to pricing, samsung and apple are expected to play the race to the bottom, but why would they when they can reasonably expect their opponents to recognise the nature of the game they're playing.

Yes, I definitely think that this counts as rigging and there's only one loser: the consumer. Instead of making a big song and dance about the efficiency of the market we should realise that the market is extremely resourceful and resilient, perhaps one of the most incredible inventions we've ever come up with, and is going to do what it can to maximise the flow of money and power to those who control it: the billionaires.

The underlying tragedy of american politics is the systematic and intentional way that the public marketplace of ideas, and centrism itself, has been stolen and perverted by this network of think tanks. IMO this idea does not get enough play. We have not been on anything remotely resembling a fair playing field. Conservatives go to extreme lengths to rig every part of the system they can in their favour, and media control and the revolving door nature of lobbying in washington and think tanks everywhere is the most egregious and one of the most important and effective ways this has happened.

I've linked this book review a few times now:

https://www.bostonreview.net/article...arlottesville/

And its sister article, also a review of the same book:

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/democracy-chains/

Both well worth reading though for different reasons. Trying to shine more of a light on this dark money trail. I feel like we should bring this up anytime we can, yet when I do it's often met with 'oh yeah I know about the Koch brothers' think tanks thing' and then we just move onto the next topic. By god, your entire democracy has been stolen under your very eyes. They've done it all in plain sight.

Very much agreed. Thanks for the links, I'll check them out.

Have you had any coherent macro level discussions about the goals of liberals / progressives, with conservatives? I've explained many times over, the macro goals of conservatives in this country. It's pretty easy and straight forward to understand. But I've never heard a good argument about the goals for the opposing side. I think the best I've heard in all my years is that liberals / progressives goals are to obtain power through political positions, and promise absurd giveaways to the poor in order to sequester their vote and stay in power. And that's a pretty ad hominem argument overall, as it really doesn't go to any meaningful goal and apparatus to achieve said goal.

To state the obvious, your theoretical race to the bottom can never be a race to the actual bottom. Apple can't produce iphones for $1 a unit. Apple and Samsung obviously make tons of money in the consumer electronics market, but margins are quite a bit thinner in a lot of other markets.

We are somewhat talking past each other. I agree with you about the corrosive influence of money on American politics. I just don't see as much deliberate coordination as you do.

Yes, I completely understand your position. That's why I was offering you several links and explaining what those links were about. Apparently my powers of persuasion sucked. Did you at least look at the Powell memo, and consider that if the U.S. chamber of commerce is openly saying these things about the American public and what big business needs to do in order to secure power, that there's probably a lot more going on behind closed doors?

That memo is from more than 50 years ago. I'm not sure how relevant it is now. In any case, I'm very familiar with the Chamber of Commerce. It's basically a lobbying group for American business interests, both large and small. It generally advocates for lighter regulation, higher barriers to consumer litigation, and other such things. It's been around forever.

There are a zillion other industry-specific groups that are focused on more narrowly tailored areas of common interest.

I'm not denying that corporate America has some common interests, and I certainly am not denying that participants in specific industries have some common interests that they pursue in a coordinated way.

You said you were cynical to the fact that there were billionaire coordinated efforts to obtain common goals. I just provided one of the most talked about memo's and directives from corporations to elected officials. I wasn't aware there was a date limit on when that applied. I provided other, more recent examples, in my previous posts.

It's there, whether you see it or not. We have receipts, we have paper trails. See the links I posted.

There are other reasons they can't get to the actual bottom, but the whole point of my example is that it's in their best interests never to actually engage in any sort of 'race to a genuinely competitive price point' and thus their pricing hews more to the principle of 'charge what the market is capable of bearing'. It's the same logic that (by a thread) managed to keep the USSR and USA from nuking each other. Lowering prices is not quite mutually assured destruction but it's certainly mutually assured lower profits.

Did you read the links he posted? It is actually pretty crazy. In the Daily Beast Kanye article, the article mentions 2 major groups hired by Kanye's campaign, and one of them was actually progressive. And the conservative one (Hotlzman Vogel) is suing Kanye for not paying them, which completely contradicts the argument they were the ones running everything behind the scenes. The fact they are suing indicates they were contracted to do a job, didn't get paid, and now are suing to get paid.

Also, the article admits Kanye's campaign was amateur hour from the start, which doesn't really align with the notion it was being controlled by a shadowy group of powerful Republican oligarchs running things behind the scenes.

Your (Rococo's) argument seems to fit reality much better. There are some individual players with individual interests who support candidates they approve for one reason or another. But there seems to be almost no coordination, and at this point it seems none of them support Trump or the MAGA movement. The reality is that Trump himself is a false messiah, but the MAGA movement itself is very much a populist one, and most of his political support and power stem from the holi poli supporting him. Not shadowy Republican oligarchs. The fact Trump has controlled the party like he has for 6+ years actually completely refutes the arguments of coordinated oligarchs running things.

The funny thing is the narrative is that Trump is trying to subvert democracy. But, the truth is the actual opposite. The fact our society has become MORE democratic over the last several decades is the only reason someone like Trump could ever gain political power. The entire federal system is designed so political elites could control who runs for office to make sure someone like Trump never could gain power.

As much as progressives like to assert everything they agree with is democratic, and everything they don't agree with is a threat to democracy, the truth is someone like Trump getting elected is a major downside to true democracies, and the reason political elites tend to not like true democracies.

Despite everything aligned against him from the political elite class, Trump still has over 50% of the Republican primary vote right now. For good or bad, that is populist democracy personified.

This is a non-sequitur. It is entirely possible for a non-establishment populist to work fervently to subvert democracy. That is exactly what happened in the United States.

And if you look throughout history, you will find plenty of examples of authoritarian, anti-democratic leaders who initially obtained power by riding a wave of populist anger.